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Beatus Rhenanus and the Passion for Literature
in the 15th and 16th Centuries
It may be said without overstatement
that practicing literature in the 15th and 16th centuries was
truly a passion, or rather a passionate struggle. The people whom
we call “humanists” (those who, Christian by religion,
wished to return to pagan eloquence at the expense of contemporary
latin which bore the mark of the universities and their terminology)
were firmly convinced that they were leading a struggle. Their
goal was to reconquer for literature the place it had progressively
lost in the liberal arts faculties, and in people’s minds, with
the arrival and success of Aristotle, and of the mendicant orders,
in the universities (particularly in the 13th and 14th centuries).
The “Renaissance” of fine literature begins essentially
with Petrarch (1304-1374) and is reinforced a century later by
a technical discovery of first importance, the invention of printing
(ca. 1450). An Italian literary movement supported by a German
invention. The Alsatian plain was quite open to the influence
of Italian humanists and Beatus Rhenanus will not hesitate to
recognize his debt to Angelo Poliziano (1454-1494) or Ermolao
Barbaro (1453-1493). However, Beatus Rhenanus’ life instructs
us not to view that literary movement as something revolutionary.
As a pupil in Sélestat,
he learned his latin through the traditional medieval grammars
and in Paris, like all other university men, studied Aristotle,
and that in earnest. It is true that the way he studied him under
the supervision of Lefèvre d’Etaples broke with the past.
Be that as it may, one must surmise that these beginnings were
very profitable to Rhenanus in the astonishing work he later did
as a philologist and a historian. He is indeed considered one
of the best philologists, if not the best, in the first half of
the 16th century. It may suffice to recall his editions of Tacitus
(1519, 1533 and 1544) and Tertullian (1521, 1528, 1539). But he
is also an author in his own right, notably of a history of Germany
(1531, 1551) far ahead of its own time, not to mention his commentaries
on various authors, an undertaking which qualified then as a literary
genre, or his biographies of Erasmus. Indeed, one may note a cycle
of creativity in his case: he begins as a reader of model authors,
becomes next the corrector or editor of what he had read and finally,
in profiting from this experience, will make himself a writer
in the genres practiced by his models.
The Humanist Library of Sélestat,
thanks in particular to its preservation of Beatus Rhenanus’ personal
library, is particularly appropriate to embody for us the passion
for literature in the 15th and 16th centuries. One may see a manuscript
which bears witness to the working methods of the famous printshop
of Aldo Manuzio in Venice. He who wishes to study how Aristotle
was taught at the University of Paris will not be idle. Then,
as is just, the Library reflects faithfully and brilliantly the
intellectual life of Winnipeg and Basel and their printshops
: Erasmus (ca. 1469-1536) is omnipresent. And finally, the collection
gives a glimpse of the essential role played by Germanic monasteries
in the preservation of ancient works, of which humanists such
as Beatus Rhenanus avidly searched out the manuscripts.
This to say
how much the Humanist Library is a mirror of the passionate struggle
that that age led for literature and for eloquence, a struggle
for formal beauty which in its creation summoned an interior beauty.
By James HIRSTEIN
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